The term “market intelligence” refers generally to information that is relevant to a company's markets. Market intelligence may include information about competitors, customers, prospects, investment targets, products, people, industries, regulatory areas, events, and market themes that impact entire sets of companies.
Market intelligence may be gathered and analyzed by companies to support a range of strategic and operational decision-making. Market intelligence may, for example, include the identification of market opportunities and competitive threats as well as the definition of market penetration strategies and market development metrics. Market intelligence may also be gathered and analyzed by financial investors and/or by financial investment advisors to aid with investment decisions relating to securities and to market sectors.
With the explosion of the Internet as a means of reporting and disseminating information, the ability to obtain timely, relevant, hard-to-find market intelligence from the World-wide Web (“Web”) has become central to many market intelligence initiatives. This ability may be particularly important to financial services investment professionals because of government-mandated restrictions on the preferential sharing of information by company management. These issues have resulted in an increased interest in applying technology to provide differentiated data and insights from web-based sources in order to yield trading advantages for investors.
However, efforts to provide timely market intelligence from internet sources have been limited by the scale, complexity, diversity and dynamic nature of the Web and its information sources. The Web is vast, dynamically changing, noisy (containing irrelevant data), and chaotic. These characteristics may confound analytical methods that are successful with structured data and even methods that may be successfully with unstructured content found on enterprise intranets.
Unlike structured data in a database, web information tends not to conform to a fixed semantic structure or schema. As a result, such information may not readily lend itself to precise querying or to directed navigation. And unlike most unstructured content on corporate intranets, data on the Web may be far more vast and volatile, may be authored by a larger and more varied set of individuals as compared to structured data, may be published in a variety of media sources ranging from mainstream news agencies to highly specialized trade publications, and in general may contain less descriptive metadata (or tags) capable of exploitation for the purpose of retrieving and classifying information.
Existing approaches to internet search are generally designed to support a wide cross-section of users seeking content across the breadth of all human knowledge generally. Assumptions associated with existing approaches may include an assumption that nothing is known a priori about a user's interests and preferences beyond what can be concluded from the entered search string. These approaches may not support the specialized needs of market intelligence users.
Interests and preferences associated with market intelligence users may be different from those of the general populace, as previously mentioned, and may be known or acquired. For example, a financial services investment manager may be interested in a company's recent commercial success in the marketplace. From a typical consumer internet search engine the financial services manager may readily retrieve a list of major new “customer wins” announced in sources that are popular as measured by links to and from these sources. However, such a user may already routinely receive similar information from existing market data channels. The financial services manager may be particularly interested in new “customer wins” that have not been widely reported online because that information may provide a securities trading advantage.
Taking another example, a financial services manager examining a company's acquisition plans may be interested in receiving articles about actual or rumored acquisitions from obscure sources. Such sources should be credible, however, given the high level of incorrect or misleading information to be found on this topic. Such personalized relevance that may derive from existing knowledge about an end user's particular interests and preferences may not be obtainable from currently available internet search engines.